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After 25 Years, Linux Format Magazine Is No More
- pjmlp 1y agoOh, I had quite a few of those. Yeah most newstands are quite a sad picture from technical magazines versus 30 - 40 years ago.
- pinoy420 1y agoThese were significantly more cool when internet access was rare
- dcminter 1y agoI agree except that I'd say "when internet access was not ubiquitous" actually. One of the major reasons I bought magazines was to have light reading when commuting by public transport (in my case into central London from the suburbs). Once the mobile phone had more and more-up-to-date material available there were fewer reasons to buy a magazine. Nowadays a magazine is something I purchase as a luxury when I specifically want to be offline and without distractions (but even there my Kindle usually does the job just as well). I must say I miss the quality and depth of writing that one got in Byte and PCW of yesteryear - even though I recognise that the online stuff often exceeds it in both breadth and quality.
- bombcar 1y agoThe best part (for me) was not only the enforced curation but the exposure to "stuff you didn't know you wanted to know about". With the modern Internet you go right to what you want and rarely see links to things you don't know about already - magazines were great for that, especially on a train ride where you have nothing much better to do than read the "other parts".
- dcminter 1y agoHN generally serves that purpose for me!
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago>I must say I miss the quality and depth of writing that one got in Byte and PCW of yesteryear - even though I recognise that the online stuff often exceeds it in both breadth and quality. My worry is the online stuff is going to fade away as well. After all what's the point of publishing online if some AI is going to regurgitate your hard work for $20/month.
- vmilner 1y agoI got the Linux Answers “trial” magazine and then subscribed to Linux Format for ~20 years. Sorry to see it go :-(
- weinzierl 1y agoThese posts always fill me with strange mixed feelings. As someone who grew up in the country without even access to a library, the monthly computer mag was my only source of info and my escape from the world I was in. So there certainly is a good deal of positive nostalgia and sadness. On the other hand it feels kind of outlandish that some of these magazines survived until this day. The last time I bought a mag was probably more than a quarter of a century ago
- dcminter 1y ago> The last time I bought a mag was probably more than a quarter of a century ago There is some kind of vicious cycle going on I'm sure - where fewer people are buying magazines, so stores have less reason to stock them, so there are fewer opportunities to buy them, so fewer people buy magazines. Probably a few will survive as niche items at a higher price. I think I'll be ok with that. One would imagine that print-on-demand solutions will emerge for the remaining (or even emerging) niche titles. I'd be nervous to start something new on that basis though.
- weinzierl 1y agoMy point is that in my perception (and certainly for me personally) this cycle ran so fast that the last magazine should have died 30 years ago.
- dcminter 1y agoSure, and I agree except that I'd put the date a lot later; a lot of magazine reading was done on-the-go, so the point at which reading on the mobile phone was ubiquitous would be the delimiter for my expectations. Nobody was reading substantial content on a Nokia 6210. I don't think the mobile revolution really became overwhelming until around 2010. Perhaps the remnants hung on after that because it took people 15 years to get their cancellations accepted ;)
- weinzierl 1y ago
- treve 1y agoAny (niche) print magazines anyone would recommend? Seems kind of fun to get something in the mail every month.
- spiffytech 1y agoI previously enjoyed 2600 Magazine, which I see is still running. Good hacker content.
- DrillShopper 1y agoI've always found the content in 2600 to be of widely variable quality, but it's definitely a publication I like to support.
- pelagicAustral 1y agoI used to get CODE magazine a few years back, not even sure if they are still printing, but I used to get a few hours of good reads (circa 2017)
- medwards666 1y agoCODE is still going. Very focussed on .Net and the whole Microsoft ecosystem, but you can still get hold of it (although I think it's subscription only, won't find it on any newsstands)
- parenthesis 1y agoSound on Sound
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agoAnd if you want to get even more niche, Tape Op!
- mukti 1y agoI subscribe to 2600 (https://www.2600.com/ https://www.2600.com/) and Eighty (https://www.readeighty.com/ https://www.readeighty.com/). I got a lifetime subscription for 2600 from my parents when I was in high school, and I subscribed to Eighty only a few years ago. My biggest gripe with larger magazines is all the ads, and uninteresting content throughout them; typically I only end up reading one or two articles and then the whole magazine feels like a bit of a waste. both 2600 and Eighty have very little/no ads, and feel more niche and content focused. Eighty is actually printed like a very nice paperback book.
- unethical_ban 1y agoNo amount of LF articles could help me set up Nagios correctly. RIP. I suspect there are some copies in a stack somewhere in my possession. I really enjoyed wondering which software I would learn about each month.
- dcminter 1y ago> if people wanted magazines on topics they care about ... they’d buy ’em. I do wonder if this is entirely true. Some print magazines I would have liked to subscribe to made it unpalatable in one way or another (dubious cancellation mechanisms etc.) I looked at subscribing to several magazines within the last few months. One had no explicit cancellation mechanism, one would have been delivered to a courier office several miles away and this one was no longer accepting subscriptions. I'm sure it's hard to make this work - but perhaps there are self-inflicted speedbumps here as well?
- medwards666 1y agoAbsolutely this. I've tried in the past to unsubscribe from publications from both Future and Dennis and in both cases it was a tortuous exercise to actually get the subs cancelled.
- xedrac 1y agoFor me it was the content to ad ratio. So many of these magazines are filled to the brim with ads, and have very little real content. Why would I spend money to look at a bunch of ads?
- dcminter 1y agoBefore all the e-tailers existed one would often buy a computer magazine such as Computer Shopper for the ads and the articles were almost a nuisance. True enough now that the best deals are all online though.
- ganoushoreilly 1y agoI still have a box of them somewhere, I have one from early 90's that still has all the circles on vendor ads where I was doing price comparisons. Those were the days.
- guywithahat 1y agoI think it's an issue of customer need. I need a car, I can't get to my job without one, and so I'm willing to pay a $250 non-refundable deposit before knowing my interest rate and wait two months for my model y to come in. I don't need a magazine, the content is free on HN, so minor inconveniences will prevent me from subscribing. If customers really needed this magazine they wouldn't care about how hard it is to cancel, and the magazine would probably make it easy to cancel because they would have better revenue streams to chase.
- ChocolateGod 1y agoLinux Format shipping Mandrake Linux was how I first got into Linux, 25 years is impressive for a magazine with such a little niche audience.
- leephillips 1y agoI have an extra reason to be sad about this, as a writer who had at least one article published in _Linux Format_ (“Julia: Learn the New Language for Scientific Computing”, back in 2019: https://linuxformat.com/archives?issue=246 https://linuxformat.com/archives?issue=246). It’s another reduction in the size of the reasonably-paying market for long pieces with technical content.
- davidwritesbugs 1y agoThis makes me so sad. I wrote a number of articles for them when Nick Veitch was editor. They paid well and respected my copy.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agofeelings-vomit incoming: i grew up obsessed with the idea of magazines in general. some of my favorites included EGM, MacAddict (especially the first few years - i'd probably think the "attitude" annoying nowadays but younger me LOVED it), 2600 (still subscribed) and so many more i've forgotten over the years. almost every magazine i cared about is gone now except 2600, which survives i think mainly as a labor of love but maybe the editor team still makes a living from it. to me, a magazine represents something more than just the raw content - others have mentioned the benefit of being exposed to more topics than you might have initially been interested in (i know i learned a lot more about storage technologies from linux magazines as a kid who never had access to fancy RAID/SAS hardware than i otherwise would have). there's also something nice about a publication with a variety of authors that are all wrangled together under a good editorial team that makes everything feel so much more cohesive than a lot of team-published blogs/online things. i also always really enjoyed the physicality of magazines, from displaying years-long collections to the idea of just pulling an old issue off the shelf to revisit a time in the past. blogs etc just don't do anything for me - i find a lot of what i read online just leaks out of my brain compared to printed publications. layouts - what a herculean effort even in the days of QuarkXpress! a blog with a nice stylesheet just doesn't compare, personally. i'm glad that there's still a fairly vibrant zine community out there but as a rule, they're often one-person labors of love. even the venerable Maximum Rocknroll went digital-only because of the cost and effort required to wrangle articles from submissions all over the world. if i may... everybody, go subscribe to 2600 right now. it's not expensive, and the quality varies, but that's because it's all user submissions - write your own articles! it's really one of the only fully-independent tech publications that still exists and it's truly the treasure of a scene that's changed wildly since it's inception.
- Voklen 1y agoI have quite a decent collection of these and only cancelled my subscription about a year ago. I just didn't read them as much as I once did and couldn't justify the cost. I did love them when I did read them though.